Education professor researches 9/11 curriculum

Jeremy StoddardJeremy Stoddard has been researching how the attacks on 9/11 and their aftermath are incorporated into secondary school curriculum, textbooks and, most recently, state social studies standards.
Photo by Stephen Salpukas

For
many adults in the United States, Sept. 11 is a day that needs no explanation. But
what about the next generation of Americans -- those who were children or not
even born when the Twin Towers fell? How is Sept. 11 being taught to them?

It’s
a question that Jeremy Stoddard, Spears Distinguished Associate Professor at
the William & Mary School of Education, has been researching for eight
years now. He and Professor Diana Hess of the University of Wisconsin-Madison
School of Education have been looking at how the attacks on 9/11 and their
aftermath are incorporated into secondary school curriculum, textbooks and,
most recently, state social studies standards.

“Given
the importance of 9/11, we wanted to know how the attacks and what has happened
in response to them are described in the curriculum materials and textbooks
written for high school students,” Stoddard said. “Because students in high
school today are too young to remember what happened on 9/11, the curriculum
they encounter will shape how they view these events as part of history.”

Stoddard
became involved in the research in 2003 as a graduate student working with
Hess, who began the study. He, Hess and several other graduate students
examined the curriculum that was created in the first year after the 9/11
attacks, looking at the goals of the curriculum and how 9/11 was treated in the
text.

They
also examined how terrorism was described and what examples were used, “which
is something we were really interested in,” said Stoddard. “Was it all going to
be just about terrorists from the Middle East or did they also include the
Oklahoma City bombing? That’s a theme that’s continued through the different steps
of (our research).”

In
2005, Stoddard and Hess became co-directors of the study, and began examining
best-selling high school history and government textbooks published after 2001.

“A
few of them rushed to production quickly and added a special section in the
back on 9/11, but the texts we studied were the first editions where 9/11 was
more incorporated throughout the books and in the narrative of the text,”
Stoddard said.

Stoddard
continued this line of research when he became a member of William & Mary’s
faculty in 2006. As more recent editions of the same texts and curriculum were
published, Stoddard and Hess tracked how the 9/11-related content changed.

“We
wanted to know how 9/11 had changed in terms of how they were treating it in
the text and what were they doing with the more recent war on terror and the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the civil liberties issues that arose from
domestic policies in response to 9/11, like the Patriot Act,” Stoddard said.

Findings

Stoddard
said they have made some interesting finds in their research so far. For
instance, they noticed that, except for in a few supplemental materials, little
detail about the attacks is included in the texts.

“That
has really held true across all of the pieces of the study that we’ve done,” he
said. “Now, we’re talking about books for kids who were six or seven years old
when it happened. The texts don’t really have many details about the attack. In
fact, the textbooks, because they are limited in space, have actually taken
some of those details out in the newer editions we looked at.”

Additionally,
many of the texts treat terrorism as a “closed concept, meaning there’s a
specific definition for it,” said Stoddard.

“They
would give this definition, but then would use examples of terrorism that
didn’t fit their own definition,” Stoddard noted. For example, some texts would
define terrorism as attacks on civilians but would then include examples like
the bombing of the USS Cole.

“Or
they would say that only non-state or non-governmental actors could be
terrorists and then they would include the Lockerbie Scotland bombing (which
has been attributed to Libyan intelligence agents),” he said.

The
researchers also found that it’s very difficult to develop accurate texts while
events are ongoing.

“They
were putting these things into production in 2004 and 2005 and they were
writing things about the Iraq war that then turned out not to be true,” he
said. “It’s really hard for a textbook to do recent history.”

Stoddard
noted that in the case of ongoing events, supplemental curriculum could be
especially useful for teachers because they don’t have the same space and time
limitations as textbooks. They also don’t have to go through the same state
approval processes that textbooks often have to go through, he said.

Stoddard
and Hess also found that curriculum producers use the events of 9/11 for different
purposes, matching the goals of the organizations that produced them.

“For
instance, there’s a group called Facing
History and Ourselves, they do a lot of Holocaust and tolerance curriculum,
so they really focused on tolerance, especially toward Muslim Americans, and
understanding religion whereas Choices
for the 21st Century really looked at 9/11 from a foreign policy
perspective. Another group called Constitutional
Rights Foundation focused on issues of civil liberties related to the US
response to 9/11, especially with the Patriot Act and other government policies,”
he said.

That
also held true for textbooks, Stoddard said. Government textbooks used 9/11 to
illustrate different concepts such as executive power, and history textbooks
mostly included it in sections at the end or in the section on the Middle East.

“It
was really interesting to see how malleable 9/11 and the war on terrorism were
to the different purposes that were there, both ideologically but also to the
curriculum goals of the organization,” Stoddard said.

Latest research

With
the 10th anniversary of the attacks approaching, Stoddard isn’t sure how
curriculum will continue to change. However, he is seeing more curriculum
asking students to “look at things from multiple and competing perspectives.”

“I
think the further away we get, and now that there is a new administration and a
different tone, we’re seeing more things that are open to questioning,” he
said. “Especially when issues with the Patriot Act came out in the news and was
recognized as really stepping over the bounds in some areas, the curriculum
producers seem much more open now in terms of asking students to question what
happened.”